


Ad Break

by Sinna



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Baltimore Crabs (Blaseball Team), Gen, Jacoby backstory time, he/they Jacoby, she/her Parker, spider mention cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-24 23:41:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30080118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sinna/pseuds/Sinna
Summary: Jacoby is a Podcast distributed by [Redacted] and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International License.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	Ad Break

**Author's Note:**

> No, I will not stop making podcast jokes about my child, but I will make myself sad about him regardless and you can't stop me.

No one was really sure how a podcast became sentient. Or why. Most people didn’t even think to wonder what kind of podcast Jacoby had been. Probably a splorts one, right? Must have been a blaseball podcast to pitch like that.

Jacoby remembers though. He’d been a science podcast, actually. A group of young adults sitting down together every week to talk about the science news they found fascinating. He’s never been able to picture their faces, but he remembers the warmth and passion in their voices. He remembers how they used to cling to it back before he was even strong enough to manifest a physical form.

See, that’s another thing people were wrong about. Jacoby hadn’t been dragged into the world of sentience to play blaseball. He’d been there before. Much before.

One day, maybe fifteen years ago, a feed had stopped updating. Who knows why? A rift in a friend group? A loss? A difference in interests? Busy lives? Jacoby thinks he could remember why if they really tried, the same way he can recite fifty cool facts about crabs (Episode 123) at a moment’s notice. But he doesn’t want to try. In all honesty, they’re a little bit afraid to.

Anyway, the feed stopped updating, and something changed. Jacoby’s first memories are of strings of data, cocooning him in the depths of the internet. He was barely anything in those days. Just a whisper of a possible reality.

But, as they say, life finds a way (Episode 42). Somehow, sparks of random data birthed life, and life, once given, is not easily relinquished. The infant podcast reached out to the world around them and found nourishment in the words that birthed him. The Crab Spider ( _Australomisidia ergandros_ ) carries her young inside her and lets them consume her flesh until they burst forth from her corpse (Episode 37). So Jacoby consumed the words that had birthed him until he could no longer be contained. They reached out blindly and hungrily collected everything he could reach. Episodes of more popular podcasts began to vanish, and the child could no longer go unnoticed.

The intervening years are a bit of a mystery, even to Jacoby. He knows someone took them in. But that someone was very careful not to leave a trace of themself in Jacoby’s memory files when they left. He suspects they left because he was becoming too organic. Too real. A sentient program can always have their memory wiped, neat as anything. What Jacoby was becoming though, was more than that. And the tiny imprints of memories that that final wipe hadn’t quite managed to eradicate, well, they told the story clear enough.

He picked the name a bit later. Ja-Co-By. Jason – Colleen – Byrne. A tribute to his former hosts. And doesn’t referring to them as hosts make him wonder? A host sometimes loses its life supporting a parasite (Episode 64). Had creating him taken more than they could give? Was that why there were no new episodes on the feed? So he took a little bit more, to remind himself where he came from. Enough of them that it felt right, but not so much that anyone would ask.

That was about the point when he was real enough to talk to other people. That’s also the point when he stopped feeding on recorded words and started feeding on conversations. People don’t expect to remember spoken conversations precisely (Episode 48), and there’s rarely recorded proof of them, so no one noticed when he ate a few words here and there.

Having a solid form was a bit trickier. That took practice. But he got it down. In the end it was just a matter of telling the universe he was real and refusing to take no for an answer.

And then someone asked him to play Blaseball.

And why not? He could hold a ball just as well as anyone else. He could throw it better, calculating trajectories (Episode 176) in their head with lighting precision.

The Crabs were a little distant at first. And who could blame them for being a bit reserved? Trauma was far more likely to breed fear and suspicion than kindness (Episode 12). It was only to be expected.

Between the cheering crowds and the locker room speeches and the pre-game strategy meetings, Jacoby ate well. There was nothing to complain about.

He’s sitting at the edge of the field, mumbling Episode 31 quietly to himself.

“…so what I’m saying here is that any way you look at it, the ocean is terrifying,” Jacoby says, in the inflection of Colleen’s voice.

He’s about to respond to themself with Byrne’s, _“Everything is terrifying if you look closely at it,”_ when someone interrupts.

“How do you figure that?”

Jacoby looks up and locks eyes with Parker Parra. Is he being weird? He thinks this might be weird. But his fellow Crab only smiles and sits down next to them.

“I’m serious. What makes you think the ocean is terrifying?”

“Well…” Jacoby reaches for the script, but it’s too far off the rails now. Hesitantly, they reach for his own words. Well, they’re not really his, but he orders them in ways no one has ever spoken to him before, so that gives him some sort of ownership. He’s good at this by now, but they’ve never tried it with something like this. Not with anything that _mattered_.

“Okay, so to start with, it’s huge. Like, think of the biggest thing you’ve ever seen. The ocean is like a billion times bigger than that.”

“What if the biggest thing I’ve ever seen is the ocean?” she asks.

Jacoby shakes his head. “You can’t have seen all of it. Not at once. It’s too big for that. You only saw a bit of the ocean. A tiny percentage. So, you’ve got a place that’s huger than anything you can imagine, and it’s full of all sorts of things no one knows about and… I think it’s fascinating, really. That’s why it scares me. Does that make sense?”

“I think so. Because there’s something in the wanting. And yet you know that if you give in and follow it, nothing you find could be quite as interesting as the mystery. But there’s no point to a mystery if you’re not going to try to solve it.”

Jacoby stares at her in surprise.

“That’s exactly it.”

“I do know some things, rookie.”

And there’s a warmth in her voice. A sort of gentle teasing that he recognizes from 193 episodes. It’s not quite the same, of course, but it’s so familiar. No one’s ever spoken to them quite like that before. No one’s ever treated him like… like a friend.

“C’mon, I want to hear more about the ocean,” she says, kindly drawing attention away from the tears forming in his eyes.

“I’ve got a whole episode on it,” he says. “If you want me to start over, I was only a few minutes into it when you butted in.”

She laughs at their joke.

“If you don’t mind, I think I’d rather hear your take on the subject.”

“It won’t be as good as the original,” Jacoby warns her.

(But he’s already lining up the words.)

“Course not. It’ll be even better.”


End file.
